


Separation Anxiety

by JoJo



Category: Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: M/M, Mag7 Bingo Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-30
Updated: 2011-08-30
Packaged: 2017-10-23 06:48:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/247372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoJo/pseuds/JoJo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fears named and unnamed</p>
            </blockquote>





	Separation Anxiety

**Author's Note:**

> to fulfill "Phobias" on [my Mag7 Bingo card](http://solosundance.dreamwidth.org/2011/12/31/)

Josiah reckoned they all had them. Said it was human to have violent fears. Maybe even ones that made no sense, that you couldn’t talk about. It was no shame, no matter of courage or cowardice, either. It was mind things.

There might have been a brief exchange of glances.

With JD there was no nameless dread, it was just high places, plain and simple. He didn’t even much like looking over the rail at the top of the saloon stairs, he admitted, and figured he’d likely missed out on the fun of a tree-house and suchlike when he was a kid.

“But still, it ain’t a bad one, I don’t lose my head or nothin’. I could climb a tree if I have to.” JD narrowed his eyes, waiting for someone to heap ridicule on him but nobody did.

Josiah himself shrugged and said he didn’t care for it when there were more than two birds sitting on the church roof.

“And one bird is fine?” Nathan asked, perplexed. “I thought one bird was a sign?”

“Ah, well it depends what bird.”

“So what’s wrong with more’n two?”

“Two could be mates, brother. Feathered contributors to the circle of life. More than two could harbinger the arrival of a flock.” Josiah twirled his shot glass in his fingers, shuffled his shoulders. “Can’t stand all that flapping.”

“Rats,” Buck offered up. “Hate the bastards. Dirty, vicious critters. Bite ya. Give ya the black death.”

“They may be vicious, I don’t know. But they ain’t dirty.” Chris had decided all along he wasn’t going to take part in this conversation. He’d been sitting with his chair pushed back from the table, staring out over the batwings. “Had one as a pet when I was a boy. Clean as ya like, and mighty sociable.”

“Hate the bastards,” Buck repeated. He glanced at Vin who was next to him, glanced away again.

They all knew about Vin in any case. That kind of strangling fear had no business being aired over the genial slop of beer and they let it pass with unnatural restraint.

“Nope can’t think of one thing.” Nathan was apologetic, as if he thought he ought to come up with something or else seem kind of superior.

“You don’t like snakes,” JD said. “You said the thought ‘a rattlers made you come out in a cold sweat.”

“Well I don’t reckon that’s what Josiah means. Hell, rattlers bring anyone sensible out in cold sweat.”

“What about Ezra, what brings him out in a cold sweat?”

Buck’s question was jovial. Chris’s head snapped sideways, knowing the question was directed to him, as if wanting the warm pulse of a lover’s seed against your belly meant knowing every damn secret thing about ‘em.

“Sure,” he said. “Losing money. Menial labor. Sleeping rough.”

Damn but he couldn’t help the way his voice fell apart on the last two words.

There was one of those heavy silences then, the kind that dropped sometimes from nowhere. Chris reached for his whiskey. He shrugged, defensive.

“Guess ya know mine, then.”

He drank the liquid down in one stuttering swallow, shunted the glass across the table when he’d finished. When he made to rise Josiah’s staying hand was firm.

“Guess we do at that,” he said, “but that one belongs to us all.”


End file.
